中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Models: Reflections on Engineering AI-enabled Systems in a Project-Based Course

Authors:
Amir Mashmool↗Kishan Ravindra Sawant↗Mojtaba Shahin↗Nico Hochgeschwender↗Rainer Koschke↗

arXiv:2606.16842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Teaching Software Engineering for AI-enabled systems entails addressing the integration of AI components within full-scale software architectures under realistic constraints. While machine learning courses emphasize model development, students often lack experience in architectural design, deployment, and monitoring of AI-enabled systems. Empirical evaluations of such system-oriented AI courses remain limited. This paper reflects on the design and implementation of a project-based master's-level course titled AI Algorithms: Theory and Engineering, at the University of Bremen, in which students developed a movie recommendation system while making architectural design decisions to address challenges related to scalability, deployment, and evolving requirements. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining analyses of student submissions and questionnaire responses to investigate integration challenges, learning outcomes, and opportunities for improvement. Our results indicate persistent difficulties in early architectural decisions, heterogeneous ML integration, evolving requirements, and data management, largely due to uneven ML and software engineering expertise. From the educator's perspective, the course fostered system-level reasoning and strengthened awareness of data-centric ML practices in AI-enabled systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Assessing Reliability of Symbol Detection in Concept Bottleneck Models

Authors:
Javier Fumanal-Idocin↗Javier Andreu-Perez↗

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are a relevant tool for explainable Artificial Intelligence because they make their predictions through human-interpretable symbols. However, high task accuracy does not guarantee that these symbols are detected faithfully: jointly trained CBMs may encode task-specific shortcuts in the bottleneck, making their explanations unreliable. In this paper, we study concept-detection reliability by swapping independently trained concept detectors and classification heads that share the same symbolic vocabulary. We use the resulting performance degradation, concept-level metrics, and symbol-wise uncertainty estimates to identify concepts that are especially prone to spurious firing. Finally, we propose a reliability-aware training strategy in which a shared concept detector is optimized with multiple classification heads and penalized for relying on globally or instance-wise unreliable symbols. On CUB-200-2011 with full concept supervision, detectors and heads are almost freely interchangeable (swap drop below one accuracy point, relative retention above $99\%$, and no concept detected below chance), whereas on a controlled synthetic task we show that, as the concept-supervision weight is reduced, models keep near-perfect task accuracy while swapped accuracy and agreement with the ground-truth concepts collapse to chance. Our reliability-aware training substantially mitigates this leakage, roughly doubling swap accuracy in the leaky regime.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Context-Guided Semantic Alignment for Feature Fusion Networks

Authors:
Hyungseop Lee↗Jiho Lee↗Woochul Kang↗

Feature fusion networks are fundamental components in modern object detectors, aggregating multi-scale features to detect objects of varying sizes. However, directly fusing features from different pyramid levels often introduces semantic inconsistency due to their heterogeneous representations. In this paper, we propose Feature Interaction NEtwork (FINE), a lightweight semantic alignment module that refines low-level features via high-level contextual guidance using cross-level attention prior to fusion. To bridge the structural gap and ensure computational efficiency, we introduce an Alignment-Aware Token Sampling that aligns corresponding spatial regions across scales, reducing the attention complexity by an order of magnitude. The resulting attention weights generate a spatial-channel modulation map that is upsampled and applied to the low-level features via residual element-wise modulation. This mechanism ensures that the network selectively enhances semantically relevant pixels while preserving the sub-pixel localization accuracy necessary for dense prediction tasks. FINE is generally applicable to various detectors and consistently improves detection accuracy without compromising efficiency.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

On the Optimal Reasoning Length for RL-Trained Language Models

Authors:
Daisuke Nohara↗Taishi Nakamura↗Rio Yokota↗

Reinforcement learning substantially improves reasoning in large language models, but it also tends to lengthen chain-of-thought outputs and increase computational cost. Although length-control methods have been proposed, the length-accuracy relationship they induce remains unclear. We train policies with several length-control methods on multiple base models in a controlled setup and find that, across both mathematical reasoning and code generation, accuracy is non-monotonic in output length, peaking at an intermediate value. Mode accuracy, however, continues to improve with length even in settings where sample accuracy plateaus or declines, indicating that the non-monotonic length-accuracy relationship is driven by dispersion around an increasingly correct center.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SuperThoughts: Reasoning Tokens in Superposition

Authors:
Zheyang Xiong↗Shivam Garg↗Max Yu↗Vaishnavi Shrivastava↗Haoyu Zhao↗Anastasios Kyrillidis↗Dimitris Papailiopoulos↗

Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves LLM problem-solving but is computationally expensive due to sequential token generation. While recent works explore reasoning in continuous latent spaces to bypass discrete token generation, they often struggle with training stability and fail to scale to complex, long-horizon tasks due to lack of supervision signal. We propose SuperThoughts, which compresses pairs of consecutive CoT tokens into single latent representations and decodes two tokens per step via a lightweight Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) module. This preserves discrete token supervision at training time while doubling throughput at inference time. We finetune Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Math-14B-Instruct, and evaluate on MATH500, AMC, OlympiadBench, and GPQA-Diamond. With a confidence-based adaptive mechanism that falls back to standard decoding when uncertain, SuperThoughts achieves $\sim$20–30\% CoT length reduction while maintaining accuracy with minimal degradation (1-2 points accuracy drop on most tasks).

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Prediction-Powered Causal Inference by Automatic Debiased Machine Learning and Semi-Supervised Riesz Regression

Authors:
Masahiro Kato↗

arXiv:2606.12892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates semiparametric efficient estimation of causal and structural parameters in a semi-supervised setting. In our setting, unlabeled auxiliary regressors are available in addition to labeled observations consisting of outcomes and regressors. Our goal is to construct estimators of causal and structural parameters whose asymptotic variances are smaller than those of estimators constructed using only labeled data. We refer to this framework as prediction-powered causal inference (PPCI). We first derive the efficient influence function and the efficiency bound, which imply that the use of auxiliary regressors can attain a smaller asymptotic variance than the efficiency bound attainable from labeled observations alone. Then, by combining the efficient influence function with the debiased machine learning (DML) framework, we propose methods that we call DML-PPCI. If we construct an estimating-equation estimator, we refer to the method as EE-DML-PPCI; if we construct a targeted-learning estimator, we refer to the method as TMLE-DML-PPCI. The asymptotic variances of both estimators match our derived efficiency bound. In the construction of the estimators, estimation of the efficient influence function plays an important role. In our study, the efficient influence function is also a Neyman orthogonal score, which depends on the Riesz representer and the regression function. For Riesz representer estimation, we develop semi-supervised generalized Riesz regression with convergence rate guarantees.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Uncertain Judgments to Calibrated Rankings: Conformal Elo Estimation for LLM Evaluation

Authors:
Bora Kargi↗David Salinas↗

arXiv:2606.13221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale. LLM-as-a-judge offers a cheaper alternative, but judge scores carry systematic errors - such as position bias, self-preference, or intransitivity - that can strongly miscalibrate the resulting rankings. We quantify the resulting judge-human disagreement at two complementary levels. At the local level, we estimate per-battle uncertainty from the judge's own score differences by propagating calibrated win probabilities rather than hard labels into the Bradley-Terry procedure. This alone provides a drastic improvement to Elo estimation accuracy, bringing LLM-derived ratings within 17.9 Elo MAE of human-derived ones when averaged over 55 held-out models on LMArena. At the global level, we apply split conformal prediction to the residual gap between LLM-derived and human-derived Elo ratings across held-out models, producing prediction intervals with distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees that account for irreducible LLM-human disagreement. Together, these two layers yield a low-cost evaluation tool that provides developers with calibrated Elo estimates and honest uncertainty bounds, without access to large-scale human annotations.To facilitate reproducibility, we release our code at https://github.com/kargibora/SoftElo .

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory

Authors:
Jinghan Yang↗Yunchao Zhang↗Wang Yuan↗Haolun Wan↗Jiaming Zhang↗Zhengyang Hu↗Yanchao Yang↗

arXiv:2606.19998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed across diverse tasks, yet they remain black boxes whose physical interactions can cause irreversible harm, making generalizable and interpretable failure detection essential. We observe that successful and failed rollouts carry systematically different information-theoretic signatures. Building on this, we formalize VLA control as a closed-loop information pipeline and derive the Triple Information-theoretic (Tri-Info) signals that capture whether actions remain diverse, temporally consistent, and coupled to state transitions. Across six VLA models and three benchmark environments, Tri-Info matches the strongest baselines in-domain. Moreover, Tri-Info transfers across architectures, environments, and the sim-to-real gap without retraining, reaching 83\% accuracy on real-world tasks where prior detectors collapse to chance. This establishes Tri-Info as a simple yet powerful method that not only detects failures with strong cross-domain generalization, but also delivers interpretable diagnostics of the underlying failure modes.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SupraBench: A Benchmark for Supramolecular Chemistry

Authors:
Tianyi Ma↗Yijun Ma↗Zehong Wang↗Weixiang Sun↗Ziming Li↗Connor R. Schmidt↗Chuxu Zhang↗Matthew J. Webber↗Yanfang Ye↗

Supramolecular chemistry, which includes the study of non-covalent host-guest assemblies, has advanced various applications. However, designing host-guest systems remains time-consuming, requiring days of dry-lab verification per candidate pair. Although LLMs have emerged as a fast alternative with strong performance on molecular binding tasks, no benchmark currently systematically evaluates LLMs for host-guest reasoning across fundamental supramolecular chemistry tasks, e.g., binding affinity prediction. To this end, we collaborate with domain experts to release the first Supramolecular Benchmark, called SupraBench, to evaluate LLMs in chemistry reasoning. Specifically, we design four fundamental tasks, i.e., binding affinity prediction, top-binder selection, solvent identification, and host-guest description, plus an auxiliary vision-based task for molecular identification. We also release SupraPMC, a curated 16M-token corpus of Supramolecular chemistry articles distilled from Europe PMC, to support the adaptation to the supramolecular domain. We benchmark a broad range of open and proprietary LLMs and find that LLMs leave substantial headroom across all tasks. Domain adaptation pretraining over SupraPMC transfers cleanly to in-distribution regression but trades off against strict letter-format output. Moreover, the difficulty profile differs sharply across task families, revealing distinct failure modes that indicate specific gaps in current supramolecular chemistry reasoning. Our source codes and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/Tianyi-Billy-Ma/SupraBench.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Faithfulness Gap: Certifying Semantic Equivalence Between Natural-Language and Formal Mathematical Statements

Authors:
Noor Islam S. Mohammad↗Tamim Sheikh↗

arXiv:2606.16541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoformalization, translating natural-language mathematics into formal proof assistants, is bottlenecked not by translation fluency but by faithfulness: a formal statement can typecheck and be provable, yet still encode a different theorem than the source intended. We introduce Bidirectional Provability Fingerprinting (\bpf{}), a framework that certifies faithfulness by characterizing each candidate through its forward and backward consequence neighborhoods in the ambient theory and matching these against probes derived from the natural-language statement. We further introduce four novel components: (i) Counterfactual Probe Generation (\cpg{}), a contrastive procedure that synthesizes probes targeting specific drift directions; (ii) the Equivalence Spectrum, a continuous faithfulness score that replaces brittle binary verdicts; (iii) Adaptive Probe Budget Allocation (\apba{}), an information-theoretic budget router; and (iv) Faithfulness-Guided Decoding (\fgd{}), which uses \bpf{} signals as a reward during autoformalization. We prove a drift detection theorem and a PAC-faithfulness result establishing that the equivalence class of a natural language statement is learnable from $\mathcal{O}(\log(1/\delta)/\varepsilon)$ probes under mild assumptions. We release \driftbench{}, a benchmark of $2{,}183$ NL/Lean~4 pairs with controlled drift labels across six subfields of mathlib4. \bpf{}\,+\,\cpg{} detects $89.6\%$ of drifted formalizations at a $3.0\%$ false-positive rate-against $41.2\%$ for typecheck and $63.3\%$ for LLM-judge baselines, and \fgd{} reduces the rate at which a state-of-the-art autoformalizer emits drifted statements by $47\%$. https://pmlrbd.github.io/BPF/

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Learning from the Self-future: On-policy Self-distillation for dLLMs

Authors:
Yifu Luo↗Zeyu Chen↗Haoyu Wang↗Xinhao Hu↗Yuxuan Zhang↗Zhizhou Sha↗Shiwei Liu↗

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has proven effective for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet its application to diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) remains unexplored. Existing OPSD methods are inherently autoregressive-centric. They inject privileged information via left-to-right prefix conditioning with token-level divergence supervision, a design that fundamentally conflicts with the arbitraryorder generation of dLLMs. We introduce d-OPSD, the first OPSD framework tailored for dLLMs. Our approach makes two core contributions. First, we reframe self-teacher construction by using self-generated answers as suffix conditioning, enabling the student model to learn from "self future-experience" rather than privileged prefixes. Second, we shift supervision from token-level to step-level, aligning training with the iterative denoising process of dLLMs. Experiments across four reasoning benchmarks show that d-OPSD consistently outperforms RLVR and SFT baselines with superior sample efficiency, requiring only around 10% of the optimization steps by RLVR and opening a promising pathway for dLLM posttraining. The code is available at https://github.com/xingzhejun/d-OPSD.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAE Interventions are Unreliable: Post-Intervention Recovery of Suppressed Behavior

Authors:
Mingyue Cui↗Linghui Shen↗Xingyi Yang↗

arXiv:2606.18322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) decompose residual-stream activations into interpretable features. Recent latent-space defenses increasingly rely on these decompositions, assuming that identified "unsafe" SAE features serve as actionable handles for monitoring and intervention. In this paradigm, clamping a specific harmful feature is expected to reliably prevent model misbehavior. However, we show that this success may hide a recoverable failure mode: the clamp may block one visible route to a behavior without eliminating the behavior itself. We formulate this vulnerability as post-intervention recovery, a constrained residual-space optimization problem. Starting from the post-intervention residual state, we optimize residual perturbations to recover the pre-intervention behavior while preserving the post-intervention values of the targeted SAE features. Even under a strong threat model where the intervention remains active throughout optimization and generation, recovery remains possible. To rule out that recovery simply undoes the intervention, we use encoder-orthogonal updates for single-layer interventions and the corresponding feature-map Jacobian in the cross-layer setting. Across TPP, unlearning, IOI, and refusal steering experiments, this stress test reveals recoverable behavior despite successful feature-level intervention. Especially in the safety-critical refusal-steering setting, we achieve a 95.8% recovery rate on valid samples while keeping defended-feature relative drift to 0.131, substantially below suffix-based baselines. A recovery-path attribution analysis further localizes this recovery to the SAE reconstruction residual, the component left unexplained by the SAE. These results expose a gap between feature-level control and behavioral completeness: SAE features can support causal intervention, but controlling them does not guarantee control over the underlying behavior.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Rarity-Gated Context Conditioning for Offline Imitation Learning-Based Maritime Anomaly Detection

Authors:
Yongmin Kim↗ByeongHoon Jeon↗Sungil Kim↗

arXiv:2606.13311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contextual anomaly detection aims to identify abnormal behavior conditional on context variables, but practical deployments often face highly imbalanced context distributions where rare regimes can be critical information. Under such frequency bias, context-conditioned models can produce unstable decisions and excessive false alarms in rare contexts. We propose Rarity-Gated Feature-wise Linear Modulation (RGFiLM), a rarity-aware conditioning module that combines feature-wise modulation (i.e., context-conditioned scaling and shifting of hidden features) with a gate controlled by a data-driven rarity score. The rarity score is estimated from the empirical distribution of context variables and regulates how strongly context modulates intermediate representations: the gate becomes more decisive under rare contexts while remaining conservative under frequent contexts. We evaluate RGFiLM on maritime trajectory anomaly detection using AIS motion sequences with ERA5 environmental context in an environment-sensitive detour scenario. When instantiated in a sequential anomaly scoring pipeline, RGFiLM achieves the best mean F1–False Positive Rate (FPR) trade-off among the compared context-agnostic and context-conditioned methods. These results suggest that explicitly accounting for context rarity is an effective approach for reducing false alarms in context-sensitive anomaly detection.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A Collective-Spin Derivation of the Uniform Magnon Hamiltonian in Cavity Magnonics

Authors:
Tomas Aguiar↗Marcos Cesar de Oliveira↗

arXiv:2606.13830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a direct collective-spin derivation of the effective uniform-mode Hamiltonian used in cavity magnonics. Starting from a nearest-neighbor Heisenberg ferromagnet coupled to long-wavelength magnetic fields, we show that the relevant dynamics can be restricted to the fully symmetric spin sector, where the exchange interaction contributes only a constant energy shift and the ferromagnet behaves as a macrospin of length $Ns$. Applying the Holstein–Primakoff transformation directly to this total spin yields the usual uniform magnon mode and its leading nonlinear corrections without first introducing site-resolved bosonic operators. This collective formulation makes explicit the interpretation of the ferromagnet as a synthetic large-spin atom and provides a compact route to the effective Hamiltonians used in driven and Floquet cavity magnonics. As a physical consequence, the leading nonlinear correction produces an occupation-dependent reduction of the effective magnon–photon coupling, providing a simple signature of finite-spin saturation under strong uniform-mode driving.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Latent Geometric Chords for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks

Authors:
Ei Hmue Khine↗Yao Li↗Jiebao Sun↗Shengzhu Shi↗Zhichang Guo↗Boying Wu↗

While decision-based black-box adversarial attacks present a severe security threat, current methodologies suffer from fundamental limitations. Pixel-wise attacks frequently introduce unnatural, high-frequency visual artifacts, while latent-space frameworks are confined by the limited search space of low-dimensional manifolds and inherent reconstruction flaws. To resolve these limitations, we propose Latent Geometric Chords (LGC) for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks alongside a variant, LGC-H. At its core, LGC navigates decision boundaries by executing a curvature-aware geometric search within a compressed semantic manifold. To guarantee high visual fidelity and circumvent dimensionality bottlenecks, we introduce a Residual-based Adversarial Generation (RAG) mechanism. RAG isolates semantic perturbations as geometric chords and superimposes them directly onto the original source image. RAG substantially resolves baseline reconstruction flaws and effectively doubles the permissible search space dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that LGC achieves robust cross-dataset transferability and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, our method, LGC, minimizes perturbation magnitudes while achieving state-of-the-art visual fidelity–with a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) exceeding 0.99 and a Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) below 0.01 at 5000 queries–and sustaining high attack success rates under stringent perceptual constraints, successfully compromising adversarially trained robust models. The source code is available at: https://github.com/eihmuekhine/Latent-Geometric-Chords.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Fusing Transferred Priors and Physics-based Decomposition for Underwater Image Enhancement

Authors:
Haochen Hu↗Yanrui Bin↗Zhengyan Zhang↗Minchen Wei↗Chih-yung Wen↗Bing Wang↗

The underwater images are captured within diverse water-medium conditions, leading to complex degradation, including color bias, low contrast, and blur effect. Recently, learning-based methods have demonstrated their potential for underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, most of the previous work focus on the training strategy or network design to make the enhanced result aligned well with the labels in datasets, ignoring that the labels are selected from the enhanced results of previous UIE methods and these pseudo-labels are noisy. Consequently, the performance of their models is not satisfactory to a certain extent. However, collecting the true labels of the underwater images is challenging. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based UIE that does not require underwater images to have paired noisy or true labels for learning. Instead, the UIE task is first divided into global color correction, haze removal, and background noise suppression following the underwater physics. Then multiple types of prior from other vision tasks are leveraged as cross-domain supervision in each step. In this way, a novel UIE is available via transfer learning, and the physics-aligned UIE decomposition provides theoretical soundness. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposal based on physics and priors fusion achieves SOTA performance in the UIE task and effectively boosts downstream vision tasks, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. Project repo: https://github.com/Haru2022/P2-UIE.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bridging Modality Disconnect in Self-Reflection via Closed-Loop Visually Grounded Verification

Authors:
Haoyu Zhang↗Yuwei Wu↗Pengxiang Li↗Xintong Zhang↗Zhi Gao↗Rui Gao↗Mingyang Gao↗Che Sun↗Yunde Jia↗

In the era of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enhancing multimodal reasoning capabilities remains a critical challenge, particularly in handling ambiguous or complex visual inputs, where initial inferences often lead to hallucinations or logic errors. Existing VLMs often produce plausible yet ungrounded answers, and even when prompted to "reflect", their corrections may remain detached from the image evidence. To address this, we propose the MIRROR framework for Multimodal Iterative Reasoning via Reflection On visual Regions. By embedding visual reflection as a core mechanism, MIRROR is formulated as a closed-loop process comprising draft, critique, region-based verification, and revision, which are repeated until the output is visually grounded. To facilitate training of this model, we construct **ReflectV**, a visual reflective dataset for multi-turn supervision that explicitly contains reflection triggers, region-based verification actions, and answer revision grounded in visual evidence. Experiments on both general vision-language benchmarks and representative vision-language reasoning benchmarks show that MIRROR improves correctness and reduces visual hallucinations, demonstrating the value of training reflection as an evidence-seeking, region-aware verification process rather than a purely textual revision step.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Overcoming Labelled Data Scarcity for Defect Classification in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

Authors:
Nikola L. Kolev↗Max Trouton↗Filippo Federici Canova↗Geoff Thornton↗David Z. Gao↗Neil J. Curson↗Taylor J. Z. Stock↗

arXiv:2506.01678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Overcoming the Impedance Mismatch: A Theoretical Roadmap for Fusing Foundation Models and Knowledge Graphs

Authors:
Sahil Rajesh Dhayalkar↗

arXiv:2606.15656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern artificial intelligence remains fundamentally divided between the continuous, probabilistic spaces of Foundation Models and the discrete, deterministic structures of Knowledge Graphs. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) attempts to connect them by serializing graph data into text, we argue this lexical bridging is merely a superficial patch. In this paper, we formalize the underlying structural and geometric friction as the Impedance Mismatch. By categorizing current neuro-symbolic integration strategies into a three-tiered hierarchy, we demonstrate that neither surface-level prompt injection nor continuous representation alignment can preserve the strict logical motifs required for reliable multi-hop reasoning. We define the specific mathematical limits, such as the Lexical Bottleneck and Topological Collapse, that show current architectures will eventually hallucinate or conflate semantic nodes. To achieve true semantic fusion, we propose a rigorous theoretical roadmap. We advocate for natively internalizing discrete symbolic structures through Structured Residual Streams, utilizing Vector Symbolic Architectures for latent sub-graph injection, and performing model updates via Orthogonal Subspace Editing. This actionable framework paves the way for models that seamlessly fuse the precision of symbolic logic with the expressivity of parametric memory.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Concept Flow Models: Anchoring Concept-Based Reasoning with Hierarchical Bottlenecks

Authors:
Ya Wang↗Adrian Paschke↗

arXiv:2606.19489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by projecting learned features into a human-understandable concept space. Recent approaches leverage vision-language models to generate concept embeddings, reducing the need for manual concept annotations. However, these models suffer from a critical limitation: as the number of concepts approaches the embedding dimension, information leakage increases, enabling the model to exploit spurious or semantically irrelevant correlations and undermining interpretability. In this work, we propose Concept Flow Models (CFMs), which replace the flat bottleneck with a hierarchical, concept-driven decision tree. Each internal node in the hierarchy focuses on a localized subset of discriminative concepts, progressively narrowing the prediction scope. Our framework constructs decision hierarchies from visual embeddings, distributes semantic concepts at each hierarchy level, and trains differentiable concept weights through probabilistic tree traversal. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that CFMs match the predictive performance of flat CBMs, while substantially mitigating information leakage by reducing effective concept usage. Furthermore, CFMs yield stepwise decision flows that enable transparent and auditable model reasoning with hierarchical class structures.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Infectious Disease Forecasting via Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Authors:
Hart↗J. C↗Smith↗McMahan↗Rennert↗

Infectious disease transmission evolves as a dynamic process shaped by biological mechanisms, population behavior, and intervention policies, yet public health responses are often driven by lagging indicators. Accurate short- and long-term disease forecasting is essential for the timely deployment of intervention strategies, healthcare capacity planning, and uncertainty-aware, risk-informed decision-making. To address this challenge, three broad classes of forecasting models have traditionally been used: statistical, machine learning, and mechanistic approaches. However, each of these modeling paradigms faces fundamental limitations. In particular, traditional statistical models often lack the flexibility needed to capture complex disease dynamics, machine learning approaches require large, high-quality data streams, and mechanistic models are notoriously difficult to calibrate. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for forecasting infectious disease dynamics. Our approach simultaneously forecasts new case and hospitalization counts, along with other key epidemiological quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number. This is achieved through the design of a machine learning model and estimation strategy regularized by a system of differential equations that encode disease dynamics of the SIHR model, thereby bridging the gap between purely data-driven and mechanistic models. We demonstrate the proposed methodology through in-depth numerical studies and an application to COVID-19 data collected in the state of South Carolina.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SCR-Guided Difficulty-Aware Optimization for Infrared Small Target Detection

Authors:
Yunus Sevim↗Beh\c{c}et U\u{g}ur T\"oreyin↗

Infrared small target detection remains challenging due to severe background clutter, low contrast, and weak spatial responses where geometric overlap alone is insufficient to characterize detection quality. In this work, we propose REEM (Reweighted Explicit-visibility Enhanced Modulation), a lightweight SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization framework that incorporates Signal-to-Clutter Ratio (SCR) as a physically meaningful visibility prior during training. Instead of modifying the network architecture or directly optimizing SCR, REEM computes a ground-truth local SCR from the input image and applies a differentiable modulation to the soft-IoU learning signal, emphasizing low-visibility targets while preserving stable optimization and identical inference behavior. REEM is integrated into a U-Net-based MSHNet without introducing additional parameters, architectural modifications, or inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over the baseline, achieving higher IoU and detection probability (Pd) together with substantially reduced false alarms (FA), particularly under challenging low-visibility conditions. These results suggest that SCR-guided difficulty-aware optimization provides an effective and physically grounded complement to conventional overlap-based objectives for infrared small target detection. The code is available at https://github. com/yall-in-one/Reemm.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Beyond Rubrics: Exploration-Guided Evaluation Skills for Reward Modeling

Authors:
Xing Yue↗Linjuan Wu↗Daoxin Zhang↗Yongliang Shen↗Weiming Lu↗

Open-ended reward modeling requires judges that can follow subtle, domain-specific preferences when verifiable answers are unavailable. Existing rubric-based methods often address this by generating criteria online for each query, but the extra generation step can add inference overhead and produce rigid or misaligned guidance. We introduce Eval-Skill, an exploration-guided method that synthesizes reusable evaluation skills for reward modeling and reframes reward guidance as context evolution rather than parameter training or per-query rubric generation. Using only 100 cases per domain for skill evolution, Eval-Skill synthesizes reusable domain-level evaluation skills through two progressive stages, workflow generation followed by principle generation, with exploration and selection interleaved across both stages. Once generated, a skill is directly injected into the judge context. Across multiple RM benchmarks, Eval-Skill consistently improves diverse judge backbones; on RewardBench 2, it yields significant gains over vanilla judging for each main backbone (+13.44% for Qwen3-8B, and 18.51% for DeepSeek-V4-Flash). Further analyses of evolution-time scaling, generalizability, and transferability show that compact evaluation skills offer an efficient new paradigm for LLM-based evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/xing-stellus-yue/Eval-Skill.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Authors:
Clark↗S. E↗Torii↗Li↗Mathur↗Barrado-Martin↗Stevenson↗Khadjesari↗Lovat↗L. B↗Vindrola-Padros↗

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

Read & Discuss → View Source →